2o6 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



wonderful as Ovid's was made. The beech-trees mingled 

 with the fantasies of the brain and brought forth boles that 

 are almost human forms, branches that are thoughts and 

 roots that are more than wood. Often, I think, he hardly 

 looked at Nature as he walked, except to take a careless 

 pleasure in the thymy winds, in the drama of light and 

 shade on the woods and hills, in the sound of leaves and 

 birds and water. Within him these things lived a new 

 life until they reached forms as different from their 

 beginnings as we are from Palaeolithic man. They 

 attained to that beauty of which, as I have said. Nature 

 was so little jealous, by this evolution. Some of his 

 pictures of the leaf-dappled branch-work of beeches 

 always remind me of the efflorescence of frost on a 

 window-pane, and the comparison is not purely fantastic 

 but has a real significance. 



And yet the landscapes of this metamorphosis are not, 

 as might have been expected, decorations that have lost 

 all smell of earth and light of sun and breath of breeze. 

 Decorative they certainly are, and I know few pictures 

 which are less open to the accusation of being scraps from 

 Nature, which it is more impossible to think of extending 

 beyond the limits of the frame. But such is the person- 

 ality of the artist that all this refinement only made more 

 powerful than ever the spirit of the motionless things, 

 the trees, the pools, the hills, the clouds. Frankly, there 

 is a deep fund of what must narrowly, and for the 

 moment only, be called inhumanity in the artist, or he 

 ^ could not thus have reinforced or intensified the inhuman- 

 ity of Nature. Consider, for example, his " Song of the 

 Nightingale." Those woods are untrodden woods as 

 lonely as the sky. They are made for the nightingale's 



